“We gave into another post-election temptation too. Many drew a simple parallel between our struggle and the black civil rights movement. Signs at protests said, “I have a dream too,” “Welcome to Selma,” and “Gay is the new black.”

There’s something to this, but it’s dangerous territory, and we have to be careful not to lose our bearings here. Gay is the new black in only one meaningful way. At present we are the most socially acceptable targets for the kind of casual hatred that American society once approved for habitual use against black people. Gay is the dark pit where our society lets people throw their fears about what’s wrong with the world. (Many people, needless to say, still direct this kind of hatred toward black people too. But it’s more commonly OK to caricature and demean us in politics and the media in ways from which blacks are now largely exempt.) The comparison becomes useful, though, in forcing us to consider the differences between our civil rights struggle and theirs.

Except in a few statistically insignificant cases (the gay kid who happens to be the child of gay parents), being gay begins with recognizing your difference from the people with whom you have your earliest, most intimate relationships. As such, it’s an essentially isolating experience and therefore breeds in many gay people certain qualities — such as independence and perfectionism — that can undermine our ability to cooperate and compromise with others. Though some of us were lucky enough to find role models, mentors, or gay friends early in life, we weren’t born into the kind of beloved community that the African-American church aspires to be. Today, the church is still the strongest black American institution, and though it is far from a perfect place, for its members it’s a cradle of love and shelter from oppression.

Our oppression, by and large, is nowhere near as extreme as blacks’, and we insult them when we make facile comparisons between our plights. Gay people have more resources than blacks had in the 1960s. We are embedded in the power structures of every institution of this society. While it is illegal in this country to fire an African-American without cause and in most places it’s still legal to fire a gay person for being gay, we are more likely to have informal means of recourse than black people have. Almost all gay people have the choice of passing. Very few black people have that option. Of course, we shouldn’t have to make that choice, and our civil rights struggle is about making sure that we don’t have to.

On a deeper level, though, the gay civil rights struggle is about preventing discrimination based on our proclivity to love, as distinct from the messier foundation of racial discrimination, which primarily has to do with protecting white privilege and wealth. No one would deny that fear of mixed marriages significantly inhibited the progress of the black civil rights movement. (Blacks won employment and voting rights a full three years before the Supreme Court finally struck down miscegenation laws in 1967.) But love and sex were not, as is the case with gay civil rights, unambiguously the heart of the matter. This is the reason our progress has been slow: Love cannot be understood in the abstract. You cannot understand it until it touches you or you find your way into its orbit. ” ~excerpt from Advocate article.

Soooo, I think the cover was to get people’s attention (which is what mag covers are supposed to do), but the key is reading the article, which clearly says that the gay/black comparison is not a complete comparison by any means.

The only thing I really still have issues with is that, while I do understand what you wrote about the possible reasons some African Americans are irate at the gay/black comparison, I STILL think it’s really, really different than a gay/alcoholic comparison. One can (initially) choose to drink or not, but all people are born with their own orientation – some het, some gay, some in between. There are those who do maintain that being gay is a choice, but they are clearly ignoring the testimony of many, many folks as well as the latest scientific knowledge. Putting one’s head in the sand is, however, a choice.

I do think we should think very carefully before making any comparison, but oftentimes comparisons are what get people to understand the common thread that runs through all discrimination.

Taking the alcoholism approach to comparison, we might say then that an undisclosed murderer would equal a person with a homosexual orientation. Or that a spousal abuser equals a homosexual person. All of these things can be hidden, but they are most certainly not equal. Thus, we could also say that an alcoholic = heterosexual. One can certainly choose to hide any orientation.

I couldn’t agree with you more as to there being similar struggles faced in the civil rights movement and in the gay rights movement. Discrimination is discrimination though it comes in varying degrees. And all the rest you said, you said so well!

While I do agree at a basic level that “gay is not the new black” I do think many of the struggles we face are similar (surely not all, but many), and that this may be a great time to revisit the idea that “faith is the evidence of things unseen” and realize that just because we gay people can hide doesn’t mean we should. Hiding is denying who God created us to be, and while I know that sometimes hiding means physical survival, those of us who are able to come out and speak the Truth have a responsibility to do just that. We are all human – inside and out – and simply because others can’t “see” the inside where our orientations etc. reside, doesn’t make it okay to discriminate against us.